You Are NOT Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit

The habit is a psychological force field that protects you from all sorts of negative feelings that try to dissuade you from training.

I’m a big believer in learning efficiency – that is, engaging in forms of training that compress the most learning into the smallest amount of training time.

But it’s true that these forms of training are cognitively taxing, and lots of people don’t want to work that hard (at first).

I don’t say that to make anyone feel bad. I say it because it’s true and it’s an important part of the optimization problem. It might surprise you to see me write this, but…

If you’re struggling to stick with demanding forms of practice, then I would recommend to (temporarily) forget about efficiency and just build a habit with some less effective but more enjoyable form of practice.

Yes, you eventually want to get to the point where deliberate practice is your primary focus and fun is a second-order optimization. But it’s okay to optimize for fun at the beginning to help you build a habit.

It’s just like getting into strength training. If you’re just starting out, but you’re not looking forward to lifting heavy-ass weights, then that’s okay! You don’t have to lift them. (Yet.)

Your #1 focus should be just getting your ass into the gym and doing some kind of activity that loosely qualifies as exercise – even if that’s just shooting hoops.

After a week of hoops, you might be motivated to try some bodyweight exercises – and then the following week maybe some light weightlifting, and maybe the week after you’ll be ready to challenge yourself with some serious weight on the bar.

It’s the same way with learning math. If you don’t feel motivated to solve a high volume of problems that are challenging enough to make you mentally sweat, that’s okay.

You can start off watching math edutainment videos and exploring Wikipedia.

Then the next week maybe try to solve some “math meme” problems each day (and look at the comments to check if you got it right).

And then maybe work out some easy arithmetic or algebra problems each day the following week (stuff that you still remember fairly well but haven’t done in a while).

By that point you’ve gotten yourself into the metaphorical weight room, doing some light lifting, and you’re ready to put some serious weight on the bar.

And that’s when you start working through an actual structured curriculum that engages you in taxing practice to pack the max possible learning into your practice time.

Once you get to that point, you’ve built a habit, and you need to do everything in your power to maintain it.

If you want to take a day off, just do a quick 10 minutes. Something that feels negligible but keeps the habit going.

The habit is a psychological force field that protects you from all sorts of negative feelings that try to dissuade you from training.

Personally, I find it harder to get myself to call up my mechanic to schedule routine maintenance than to do a 30-minute workout in the morning – even though the call only takes a few minutes and doesn’t involve any sweating!

Why? Because of habit. The workout is challenging but I don’t think anything of it because the habit is so strong. Not a single negative feeling gets through the force field.

Whereas, when I have to call to schedule maintenance, I have to look up the phone number, check my calendar, etc. This is all super easy, but without a habit, even “barely an inconvenience” is enough to make me procrastinate a bit.

In closing, let’s circle back to something I said at the beginning of this post: “these forms of training are cognitively taxing, and lots of people don’t want to work that hard (at first).”

For many of these people, the problem isn’t that they’re inherently lazy. The problem is that they haven’t built a habit.

Lelouch wrote this great post last week that I’m going to be referring back to for all eternity: You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites

It’s the same with hard work: you are NOT lazy, you just lack a habit.

(Though I might add: if you know this and you’re still unwilling to build a habit… then yeah, you’re lazy.)